Courtesy of Massively OP, I’ve just read about a planned update for The Secret World that will add a pseudo-housing area to the game – not housing really but still a customisable space for player’s to take ownership of.

From the little details I’ve seen it sounds similar to the Seat of Knowledge area in the Mists of Pandaria expansion – you collected items for display in a phased room within the main player hub for the continent. They had a similar mechanism with the pedestal trophies in the Garrison although I didn’t unlock any in that expansion.

A new feature coming to TSW is the Museum of the Occult; this exists as a location in London already, but outside of a particular investigation mission it is inaccessible. The dev stream video talks about it starting at 38:00.

According to the preview given in the stream, the museum will have wings for each region in the game (plus one for ‘world’). Players get to populate the exhibition spaces in each wing by unlocking exhibits through gameplay. The example given is that lore objects will be added for major creature types and the player will have to complete a lore collection to display that monster in the museum.

There’ll be some customisation options regarding the pose of the monster exhibit requiring that you upgrade the display pedestal. Placing exhibits will cost the character AP since each holographic display is fed from your character’s memories.

It is a very limited version of player housing, more along the LOTRO model than say Everquest 2’s. However as I have come to expect with TSW, the devs seem to have put some thought into how the purpose and story of the system fits into the game world. It’s not just housing for the sake of having housing. There’s some story and gameplay behind unlocking and developing it I think. There’s even a new “assist” system being added, which is linked to the museum, that will unlock new passive abilities related to specific monsters or exhibits in the museum; the demo given was of a chance on attack for an ak’ab to appear and charge your target for extra damage.

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One Response to TSW: Museum of the Occult

I thought it looked really interesting. If a lot of it can be done in the part of the game I have access to – pretty much everything overland to the end of the Carpathians – then I would consider re-subbing for a month or two just for this.